I have a Perl hash of hashes of ... around 11 or 12 elements deep. Please forgive me for not repeating the structure below!
Some of the levels have fixed labels, e.g. 'NAMES', 'AGES' or similar so accessing these levels are fine as I can use the labels directly, but I need to loop over the other variables which results in some very long statements. This is an example of half of one set of loops:
foreach my $person (sort keys %$people) {
foreach my $name (sort keys %{$people->{$person}{'NAMES'}}) {
foreach my $age (sort keys %{$people->{$person}{'NAMES'}{$name}{'AGES'}}) {
. . . # and so on until I get to the push @list,$element; part
This is just an example, but it follows the structure of the one I have. It might be shorter not to have the fixed name sections (elements in caps) but they are required for reference purposes else where.
I tried to cast the elements as hashes to shorten it at each stage, e.g. for the second foreach I tried various forms of:
foreach my $name (sort keys %{$person->{'NAMES'}})
but this didn't work. I'm sure I've seen something similar before, so the semantics may be incorrect.
I've studied pages regarding Hash of Hashes and references to hashes and their elements and so on without luck. I've seen examples of while each loops but they don't seem to be particularly shorter or easier to implement. Maybe there is just a different method of doing this and I'm missing the point. I've written out the full set of foreach loops once and it would be great if I don't have to repeat it another six times or so.
Of course, there may be no 'easy' way, but all help appreciated!
$person is the key, to shorten things for the inner loops you need to assign the value to something:
foreach my $person_key (sort keys %$people) {
my $person = $people->{$person_key};
my $names = $person->{NAMES};
foreach my $name (sort keys %$names) {